A World Above
by Iris Lovelace
Summary: The Royal Airship Division has just released plans for a new airship to be built. They have decided to call it the Titanic. How will this new ship fare in a steampunk world? What will become of her maiden voyage? The story of the Titanic retold.
1. Chapter 1

**A World Above**

**Chapter One: Flicker Powder**

The _RAS Titanic_ was the largest airship of her time. Commissioned into service in 1890, the ship had had but one mission: give the common vacationer an adventure.

"The Royal Airship Division has announced that plans for a new, faster, bigger ship are to be laid in a few days you know. I bet your father is working on that design right now little Ms. Bell." The burly man behind the counter often called her by her father's name, Bell. He was Joseph Bell, the single most decorated and prestigious engineer in all of England. He had pioneered years before, the field of advanced optic and sensory illumination; that was, lighting. He had won several scientific awards for his many breakthroughs but none was as important as his discovery of the most efficient and abundant source of light that could be harnessed into the little glass bulbs named after Bell himself.

"This energy is to be the most widely used in all of England! Perhaps even in all of Europe!" Her father had exclaimed at its discovery. He was almost right; it was the second most widely used energy supply, second only to steam. Since it was nothing that anyone had ever come into contact with, except for a few random encounters here and there scattered across time, no one knew what to call it. Some people tried to name it after Bell and chose the name Belluminium or Bellumose. Mr. Bell was in no such state to have his name forever immortalized in a discovery so important. He would accept every credit for his creation of the glass sphere which held the little particles of light, but not for the discovery of said particles. He believed that energy was universal and should thus have a name that did not boast affiliation with any such scientist or company. Energy was energy and was not created, only its potential discovered. In the end, he did get to name the element but after the great laborious task of choosing which name to don on the element. He chose the name that his daughter, Mary Bell, had first called it when she saw it; Flicker Powder.

Flicker Powder was a translucent substance that was found in layers of rock under bedrock. It was fairly easily mined and separated from the rock around it as one might mine a vein of iron ore. In nature, it was a rock and not a powder that had the consistency of gold. People first began to mine it because it resembled gold but once it was found not to actually be gold, people dismissed it as worthless. That is, everyone except Joseph Bell.

The first thing Mr. Bell noticed about the rock was that it gave off the same consistency and light color as a candle or a fire did. One gram of this luminous rock gave off the same light consistency as one lit match and did not lose its vitality for a month. It was safe to touch and probably even safe to eat should one be interested in eating luminous rocks. The rock was even softer than gold so it was easy to shape and cut. Mr. Bell had not been the first person to see this then unnamed rock as a possible sort of light but he was the first to ground the rock into powder. The idea occurred to him while in a tea shop meeting a friend for afternoon tea. Two women were sitting next to him discussing an article in that morning's _Herald_ edition. It was a fashion piece, even though those articles rarely made it into the _Herald_. The glowing rock was common knowledge by this time, late in the 1870s, and people were starting to put hunks of it in their houses. The particular article happened to be about this stone.

One woman had commented to the other that mounting "heaping hunks of rock" onto one's walls in one's home was a terribly awful way to light the place. The second fully agreed and wished that some scientist somewhere would come up with a better way to use the rocks that was much more stylish and fashionable. At that instant, the waiter asked Mr. Bell if he would like sugar or milk in his tea. He watched as the waiter put two cubes of sugar into the transparent glass cup and the cubes dissolved. Vaguely he thought of how he disliked the dissolved sugar lining the bottom of the cup so that the last sip was always too sweet. Then, an idea struck him. What if he were to coat a transparent surface with a crushed up form of the glowing rock? A transparent surface such as glass could be shaped and blown to any size or figure. How was he to coat the glass though? What was the material like as a powder? Would it naturally stick to substances or would there need to be an adhesive? How was he to even crush the rock? Such thoughts filled his mind and, one by one, over the next two years each thought was sorted out and solved.

In 1879, Joseph Bell was named the winner of that year's Scientific Breakthrough Award for his Flicker Powder. He soon became a household name with his invention. He was so popular that when the Royal Airship Division began a project so large, that needed the most up to date equipment, they went to Joseph Bell first for their plans for lighting. Of course these little spheres of light, called jay-bees, didn't last forever. Sooner or later the powder would die out and the jay-bee would have to be replaced. This was the biggest obstacle for the RASD. Carrying tens of thousands of little jay-bees around took up much more room than their desired ship could afford and stopping every month or so to restock their supply and change all of the old jay-bees out with new ones took far too long. So, the RASD hired Joseph Bell to come up with a sequel to the jay-bee that would burn longer than the current ones by about twice as long, burn forever, or have a mechanism to automatically switch out the dead Flicker Powder with new powder (apparently it's easier to store a thousand grams of Powder than a thousand jay-bees).

"Yes sir, I believe my father has been hired by the Division. He is in charge of lighting the entire ship which is said to be larger than even the _RAS Olympian_." Mary replied to the hearty gentleman who had been set to care for the Bell family while Joseph was away at the Harland and Wolff Royal Air Field. The gentleman's name was Baxter Basil. People often switched his name around to Basil Baxter as that sounded like a more proper English name than Baxter Basil. He claimed that his mother gave him a last name as a first name to spite his father who was Richard Basil II and wanted to name their son Richard Basil III. His mother would have none of it since they were not a royal or noble family and had no use in pretending to be one by the vain naming of her son in his father's lineage. All of that was rubbish of old and so she donned him a last name for a first name.

"Well I'll say! You said _larger_ than the _Olympian_? How can that be? She was the biggest airship to ever fly in any sky! How can they make a blimp that can sail any farther or any higher?" Baxter exclaimed.

"I don't know," Mary answered innocently, "That's just what father's letter said."

"Well, if Mr. Bell be saying it, it must be true." Baxter resolved contentedly but still awestruck.

Baxter was not a man of great intellect and it was the small things in life that stuck him as beautiful or ponderous. When he was a younger man, Baxter had bought the pub that he now owned off of an older man who always kept a clock running around his neck. That was back in 1852 when steam power had just taken over coal as the best source of energy and clockwork gears were getting comfortable in their time. Baxter had no use for such modern technology and though the pub was full of gear and steam powered gadgets, the old man promised to teach Baxter how to use everything in the pub if he would just buy the building. Feeling the bravado of youth flood his soul as the perfect opportunity to do exactly what he had wanted to do with his life arrived, Baxter agreed wholeheartedly to the man's offer. Within one month Baxter had worked up the money he needed to pay the owner and bought the Gears and Cheers Pub.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two: Introductions

As an emerging scientist, Joseph Bell was quite popular with the scientific community. After graduating from Oxford, Mr. Bell was named one of the institute's most promising young scholars of our time. Though he wasn't a household name until 1880, Mr. Bell was quite popular with the London middle class. Mr. Bell spent many a night in the pub. Though a scientist, Mr. Bell was not a typical, spotless, almost flaunting individual. He liked the common man. He enjoyed the company of another human being, regardless of social status or any other Englishman marking. Mr. Bell would talk to anyone who would listen.

One reason why people liked Joseph so much was his willingness to talk about whatever seemed interesting that is, not always talking about his current project or the latest word from the scientific community. Anyone and everyone was his friend. He was a good natured man all around.

Joseph often spent nights in the Gears and Cheers Pub holding stimulating yet not necessarily intellectual conversation with everyone from Baxter Basil to the waitress whom everyone referred to as Madame Pomp. Madame Pomp was a big burly woman who didn't look like she took up very much space until you either heard her speak in her manly booming voice or until she was breaking up a bar fight and throwing both the poor souls out of the front doors. Madame Pomp was the Pub's peacekeeper and was not a force to be reckoned with. She perhaps could have been called "pretty" in her youth but that term, even then, would have been a stretch. What she had in beauty (and trust me, it wasn't very much) she destroyed with her personality. She was loud and rough around the edges. It is such a curious thing of the human race that one who is a bit rough around the edges so to say can be completely written off for a devilish creature with a spirit more foul than even the drunkest of sailors, without even the slightest look deeper into her character. Human souls are bottomless wells of emotion and character. One should not disregard the well based on a simple taste of the top skimming of the water, but rather quench their thirst with water drawn from deeper in the well. This was the social art of Mr. Bell. He knew just how to operate the bucket and pulley to draw only the best water from each soul-well. And in this art he was well skilled.

Aside from his work in the scientific theory of luminous rocks and his social prowess, Mr. Bell enjoyed the fashion of the time. He grew up right when the steam revolution was taking place and though his family was upper-middle class, he couldn't always afford the latest and greatest of the steam fashion movement as he would have liked. But even from infancy, so his mother would claim, Joseph was a bright boy. In secondary school, Joseph learned the craft of metal working in all sense of the phrase for which he used to craft his own accessories according to the fashion. In his late adolescent years Joseph worked for a time in an iron mine. He learned many things in that mine about hard work and the joys of receiving due pay.

In the prime of his life, Joseph was a strapping man. He always kept his clothes neat even when casual. He knew how to mend a button, resole a shoe, frame glasses, repair a broken pocket watch and other homely tasks that one should not expect a former miner to be able to do. Joseph had learned from a small age that knowing such things in life was often better than having to pay someone to do the task. He kept his beard neatly trimmed close to the skin. It was a typical looking beard that did not connect to the sideburns but rested solely on the chin and around the chops. All of the lines were straight and smooth; Joseph was handy with a razor and could easily carve out a straight line from even the bushiest of beards.

A marked feature of Mr. Bell's presence was his Kapp and Peterson pipe. It was a neatly furnished cherry wood pipe with a black finished mouth piece and the Royal Airship Division's emblem on the side in silver. Mr. Bell could smoke any tobacco in his pipe but preferred the Virginia bright. It had a light taste that was light enough to be combined with other flavors but by itself was naturally sweet, but not too sweet, and had a pleasant smell to it. Joseph didn't smoke everyday but still often enough to make his pipe a telltale feature of his appearance. He believed that a pipe every Sunday evening was the perfect way to end a day and start a week.

As to where he took his smoke, Bell preferred to sit in a little corner of Baxter's pub and watch the guests come and go as he pleased. Sometimes a gentleman would join him and, Bell being his friendly self, they would engage in the most good natured of parleys. Bell was a very well read man who could talk about anything from current literature to the most current of events. He read the paper every morning with his tea and buttered bread. One striking quality of his speech though, was certainly his ability to shift the conversation form topic to topic as he pleased without boring or losing his counterpart. Small talk was as much his forte as was full conversation.

Mr. Bell always sat in the same corner. It was close enough to the hearth to keep him comfortable in winter and far enough from it to keep him comfortable in the summer. I sconce sat above his head on the wall where it gave off the homely glow one knows to be Flicker Powder. The wood paneling on the wall was cherry, matching his Kapp and Peterson, as were all the tables and chairs. Behind him, tucked neatly in the corner, stood the coat and hat rack. It was a bronze piece of metal roughly as tall as Baxter who was a good deal taller than Joseph. The bottom of the stand curled out into ornate circles which all seemed to meet together at one point or another on the floor. Inside each of the three large circles were more circles which intersected and crossed in a uniform pattern of curved diamonds and bent squares. The hooks on the stand came up and curled out much as the bottom of the stand did. There was a single circle on the top of each hook. The golden bronze finish was slightly worn away in several spots on the hooks to reveal a less attractive grey. The top of the stand was a spire in the form of the old gothic spires which stand on the tops of old wrought-iron gates outside of church cemeteries. The coat rack seemed to Joseph to be the finishing piece in that corner of the room which attracted him so much. It seemed to glow under the light of the sconce and next to the fire of the hearth.

The rest of the pub was decorated, or rather scattered with, trinkets and gadgets of all sorts from the time period. It was as if any device ever made could find some artistic use here in this little pub in London. The Gears and Cheers Pub, owned by Baxter Basil who was not trending with steam when he bought the place off the old man, had amassed and collected everything to do with steam or clockwork. In the end, he became obsessed with the types of things that scared him at first. The Gears and Cheers pub was aptly named as the years went on and more gears were mounted on walls and stuck onto tables and chairs. Let us not forget either the cheers had in the pub through the years.

The story truly begins on the thirteenth birthday of little Mary Bell, the daughter of esteemed scientist Joseph Bell, in the Gears and Cheers Pub. It is the year 1884, five years after the discovery and application of Flicker Powder. Mr. Bell is now one of the wealthier citizens of London, though no one would ever know the difference either in his attitude or apparel. But for his daughter, Joseph would spend a fortune to make her happy, even though she didn't require such measures to be so. She was his only daughter and that was enough reason for him.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three: Thirteen

"Thirteen today, young miss!" Said a gentleman walking by the counter. Mary was wearing her new dress, still stiff from the starch, but stopped fidgeting with a piece of lace to look up at the face that had spoken to her. He was a handsome man of his early twenties who had taken a liking to this pub and its commonplace inhabitants. He donned his black top hat, wrapped in a violet ribbon that was tied in a modest bow off center and had a miniature gear set-up in the center. The little gears turned their way round and round each other, making a soft _clink_ that could hardly be heard except in the stillness of drawing rooms with soft couches and softer faces. Mary smiled when she saw him standing there, taller than her noticeably, even when she was sitting at the high top stools around the bar. It was her favorite place to sit because from her perch, she could watch Baxter tinker idly with trinkets or watch Madame Pomp bustle around the bar or the back rooms.

"Hello Sir," Mary replied in her sweet voice. It was gentle and soft, yet not without some extra unknown hiding behind it. The man tipped his hat again.

"May I sit with you a while?" His green eyes were charming. He regarded her very delicately, as was the custom, with added intensity that she could not place.

"Of course, Sir. I would enjoy your company a while." Mary looked to the side, as if something on that side of her dress had caught her attention as he sat down next to her. She hid her face from his, only for a moment, to compose herself. While they had been talking, she had become aware of her face becoming red and hot. Once she had regained some of the reigns, she turned back to him, who had ordered a drink.

"So, tell me," the man said, smiling his charming smile, "what would you like for your birthday?" Mary looked at the man, awestruck and not believing that he was serious. After a moment, she grinned and restrained herself from throwing her arms about his neck and showering him in affection. He laughed to see the joy he brought upon her. She laughed too, first at her own reaction and then for the only reason that he was laughing too.

"Darius, you know that your friendship is all I ever ask of you." Mary was able to calm herself enough to say the sentence before his shaking shoulders, shaking for restraining his jovial laugh, brought her again to the brink of tears.

"Oh, my dear," he said, wiping his eyes with an embroidered handkerchief and swallowing the rest of his drink, "Not but thirteen and already a woman!" Mary folded her arms, as if cross, but could not keep up the ruse for long.

"Darius! You are too kind. How can I refuse?" Darius flashed her a daring smile to which she blushed and again turned her face away. She pretended as if there was a loose string about her waist and fiddled with the fabric.

"Mary, which, out of all the shops and tailors in London, is your favorite shop? Where does your fancy find its humble beginnings in the threads of your clothes? Tell me, where do you find such remarkable outfits as these, once just piles of fabric and lace, turned into brilliance upon you're wearing it?" Mary lightly pushed his arm, which was resting on the table top of the bar. His sleek outer coat was still slightly wet from the rain outside and his arm slipped off the edge. The arm was also caressing in its soft palm his cleanly shaven face. When his arm slipped, it was so unexpected to him that he could not catch himself in time and his face fell against the solid cherry of the bar.

"Oh! Darius! I am so sorry!" Mary exclaimed, putting a gloved hand around his bicep and the other to her mouth. Whether she was simply exerting her shock or stifling a laugh could not be discerned.

"What the devil is going on out 'ere!" Came a cry from the back room. Madame Pomp came bustling into the room with a ragged dish towel about her hands. Upon seeing Mary's shocked, apologetic face and Darius rubbing the side of his, she concluded (wrongly) that Mary had finally given the foolhardy young man a taste of her hand.

"You show that reckless fellow that you are a woman proper now," said Madame nodding to Mary. "And you," she pointed a meaty finger at Darius' head, "If you so much as say one wrong word to this lady-"

"Come now, m'lady. It was merely an accident, a push you see, between two friends." Baxter put a hand on the brutish lady's shoulder and spun her back towards the kitchen.

"Hrmph," said Madame Pomp as she headed back towards her routine. Baxter turned to the two old friends, if you can call a friendship that is but five years aged old, and regarded their happy go lucky nature.

"You two," he said, pointing a brandy glass in their direction, "should pay a little more attention to your surroundings." He motioned the pub with the glass, smiled, and then placed it in its spot within the oak cabinet. Darius laughed good-naturedly.

"Come on Mary; let's go find you a new fancy." Darius left a shilling on the table for his drink. He topped his hat again and held out his arm for Mary. The rain had since stopped, as it was only a drizzle to begin with. They walked along the street, passing many shops of all sorts on the way. The most notable of these shops was the Optics. Mary loved this shop and slowed her pace as she looked through the window. Under large gold and red gothic letters, different sorts of glasses, monocles, opera glasses, mirrors, and glass figurines sat on display. Darius stopped to look with her, though his enthusiasm was merely due to her interest. She didn't linger long at the window, but he did note that she looked at a certain pair of goggles with a rather strange affinity. They were a men's eye piece that originated from the operators of airships. They were rarely worn on the eyes as they were intended but rather about the forehead or on top of the hat, should a man be wearing one. They had just come into fashion.

Mary had a gander at the glass and then moved on, but had a dreamy air about her. Darius held her close but did not feel her as engaged in their conversation as before. Her mind wandered back through the glasses, always to stop on the goggles. For a time they walked in silence until Mary caught sight of her favorite tailor.

"There Darius, A Length of Lace is my favorite shop," she said pointing to a small window still someway off in the distance. It was slightly in an ally and sat between two dirty buildings made of dark grey stone smudged black over the years. The lighting seemed poor at best. The door was a yawning mouth, containing too much to fit within its frame. The window was clean however, despite the foggy ally next to it and the blackened stone around it. Only one mannequin could fit in the window which was bare at the moment. Darius cast a questioning look to Mary but no protest rose upon his lip. She watched the building grow larger, but only slightly, as they approached.

In fact, the door was too big for its frame. It seemed to hang from one corner and tilted downward so that a gap was filled with light from inside at the top. The bottom corner of the door touched the doorstep. On the dirty grey stone beneath their feet, there were scars, a lighter grey almost white, in the stone where the door scraped along when it was opened. The corner of the door had a festering, open wound where the red paint was gone and the wood was frayed out like an old moth eaten sweater. There was a stain on the door in the shape of a knocker that no longer resided there. Two holes were drilled in either side of the stain where the knocker had once called home. Darius was surprised to see a handle still on the door. It was faded bronze that once may have been polished but that time was long ago. There was no hint of a locking mechanism anywhere on the door. Darius was about to protest Mary's bringing him here when she opened the door to reveal a clean, decorated foyer.


End file.
